Monday, January 18, 2016

One more review for Mick Jackson's novel Yuki Chan in Brontë Country: The Telegraph gives it 3 stars out of 5.

The Brontë Parsonage is a site of pilgrimage for many – not least the 35 elderly Japanese tourists aboard the coach that carries Yukiko, 23, to Haworth. Yuki has arrived from Japan on holiday, ostensibly to visit her sister in London. As she chugs towards the parsonage, it becomes clear that her purpose isn’t to pay tribute to Charlotte, Emily and Anne either. Yuki is in Brontë country on “an investigative/spiritual visit, to do with her dead mother”. Armed with five photographs her mother took when she visited Haworth 10 years earlier, shortly before her mysterious death, Yuki considers herself a Psychic Detective, on a mission to delve into the past. (Francesca Wade)

Herald Zimbabwe features the collection of essays Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire.

Written by scholars from South Africa, India, Barbados, New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the US, each on a book that shaped British imperial life.
The ten books include five famous block-busters and five now-obscure texts that in their day were influential.
The five block-busters are imperial or anti-imperial classics: Robert Baden Powell’s Scouting for Boys (1908), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Thomas Babington Macaulay’s five volume History of England (1848). The anti-colonial texts are Mohandas Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909) and The Black Jacobins (1938) by CLR James, the famed Caribbean revolutionary thinker. (Isabel Hofmeyr)